Back To The Stars: ROMANCE: ALIEN (Alien Invasion Abduction SciFi Romance) (Fantasy Anthologies & Collections) (8 page)

I ducked low and crouched in front of the window of Marsh’s unit. The curtains were white and nearly as transparent as gauze. Plus, there was a 4-inch gap so I had a clear view of everything that was going on inside, and what was going on inside was freaky. The girl was actually very pretty—that is if you ignored all the tattoos and piercing, but I guess some guys are really into that look—and was fully clothed. Marsh, however, was not. Marsh was on the bed wear a baby bonnet and sucking on a pacifier. The girl stood over him strapping him into the biggest diaper I’d ever seen, and the girl was lecturing him about what a bad baby he was. I’d heard of this kind of thing on some late night cable documentary, but I never in my life thought I would see it live and in living color.

I felt laughter bubbling up in my stomach at this ridiculous sight, but I needed to hold it together long enough to get my shots. I keep the lens low and start snapping as the girl rubs baby lotion into Marsh’s well defined chest and stomach. Suddenly, his entire body starts to strain. His skin turned a bright red, the veins in his neck bulged, and he’s holding his breath as if he’s bearing down and preparing for something. Finally, he let out a long, pleasure filled breath and begins to fuss and cry like a baby would.

“Did you mess yourself again, baby?” I hear the girl ask as she begins undoing the diaper. “You are a very, very bad baby.”

She unfolds the enormous diaper, and sitting right in the middle of it is a giant turd.

I see this, and I completely lose it.

My laughter seems to start at the top of my toes like someone is tickling me and shoots through me like a bolt of electricity and my entire body is shaking and wracked with laughter. The whole scene goes blurry with tears and I barely notice as both of their heads turn at the sound of my hyena guffaws. Thankfully, I collect myself enough to start running as Bad Baby Marsh rockets off the bed and charges out the door in nothing but his birthday suit. He’s practically right on top of me as I jump into the Toyota—which thankfully turns over with the first turn of the key—and I leave him standing in the parking lot just as God made him covered in road dust.

After a couple of miles, I finally have to pull over so I don’t kill anyone because I’m laughing so hard.

Chapter 8:

So I know I sounded a tad bit grumpy about my particular lot in life yesterday, and I’d like to apologize for that. Honestly, I really don’t have it all that bad. I mean, being a PI is like running any business. You have your ups and downs. You have your months where you don’t know if you’re going to be able to make rent on your office, or if you’ll even be able to afford to pay your annual license fee. But then there are other months where you’re absolutely flush and the cases just keep coming and coming, and soon enough you have so much money rolling in that you’ll be able to pay your rent 6 months in advance and put a decent down payment on a new and far more comfortable car. It’s these months that you absolutely live for. That you begin to think that you made the right decision to be your own boss instead of going to work with one of the big corporate detective agencies.

Admittedly, these months have been few and far between since I hung my shingle a year ago, but when they happen, I feel like a God. And I just so happen to feel that way the morning after the Marsh case as I’m printing out some prime shots to give to Mrs. Marsh when I meet with her on Monday. The 12 pictures—one of which sends me into a 15-minute giggle fit—will end up netting me $6000. More than enough to cover rent for the next 3 months and buy me a wider variety of groceries other than cheap jars of peanut butter and Ramen noodles. But then again, maybe just a little of that cash will end up making it to the greyhound track. In fact, I imagine ALL of it will make it to the track.

Okay, I lied, I obviously have more than one vice than my e-cigarettes, so sue me.

I come from a long, long line of cops starting with my great, great grandfather back in the late 19th century in Boston when city police were little more than hired thugs and strike breakers. My great grandfather redeemed the family name once he moved west to Chicago, and ever since then, my family served proudly in one part of Arizona of another. At least until my grandfather and my dad screwed it all up and went into business with all the wrong people. Sure, they still jailed and arrested people who needed to be punished, but they would also purposely lose or steal evidence for a certain group of Mexican nationals who transported  massive amounts of cocaine and heroin into the state and left dozens—if not hundreds—of bodies in their wake. They were bad, bad people, and dad and grandpa were at their beck and call.

At least until they got caught.

The two of them could have saved themselves and their hard fought pensions if only they’d turned state’s evidence and went into WITSEC. But the U.S. Attorney wasn’t able to turn either one of them, and they were saddled with 13 counts of possession with intent to distribute and a couple of murders. Needless to say, neither one of them are going to see the light of day outside of prison walls for the rest of their natural lives. It also completely screwed my future career goals, that is unless I wanted to go and be police in Nebraska or Kanas or some other middle America nowhere land. And chances are, that wouldn’t fly either because dad and grandpa are both doing their time in federal institutions. The thing with the law enforcement community is this: No matter where you go, you can’t run from your past, and police have very long memories.

But for a while there—mostly in college—I still had hope. I stuck with my criminal justice major, and in my senior year I applied to every single law enforcement organization in the state, and was rejected by all of them. I even applied to the FBI and CIA and got zero play from either agency. I mean, ASU is the second largest CIA recruitment center in the country and even those dirty bastards didn’t want me. After graduation, I bummed around, worked retail jobs, waitressed, I even got my teaching certificate so I could teach high school. But every single thing I tried to do, I failed. I was born and bred to be to be law enforcement, but they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. That’s when I got the idea of becoming a private detective.

Of course, obtaining a PI license in the state of Illinois is just a matter of filling out a 10 page application online and paying a $250 processing fee, and once they get your money, you can print your license right out on your laser printer. The conceal and carry license was almost as easy to come by, too, except I had to attend a two hour “training”, which basically consisted of me firing at paper targets and then taking a 15 question written exam. But within two months of making my decision, I was a fully licensed and bonded PI and it’s been peaches and cream ever since.

***

I was finishing up my report on the Marsh case when someone knocked on my front door. I’m not exactly what you would call a social person, so I wasn’t expecting a visitor of any kind and normally knock at my door would set my paranoia into high gear (Don’t ask why, it’s just how I am.). But I was so distracted by typing up my report that I opened my apartment door without checking the peephole, and Stephen Marsh—the big baby himself—was standing there larger than life.

Obviously, my jaw hit the floor and I made a half ass attempt to slam the door in his face. He easily blocked and pushed his way inside. My eyes darted around my living room searching for my glock, but then remembered that I locked it up the night before in my bedroom closet. So instead, I put my body into something that I thought might resemble a combat stance. Marsh held up his hands in mock surrender.

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

Yeah, how many times has someone said this and then had head bashed in?

“How the hell did you find me?” I shouted.

“I’m very good with numbers. I memorized your license plate number as you drove away last night. All I needed to do after that was look it up with a phone app my company is testing for law enforcement and it provided me with all of your information.”

I should also mention that I absolutely hate smartphones. Personally, I think they’re going to be the end of the human race, and not because of apps like Marsh used to track me down, but because people constantly have their faces buried in them. And I mean buried: While they’re walking, eating, driving, screwing. There were a huge pet peeve of mine. But I did have to admit I was pretty impressed with whatever app Marsh used to track me down.

“Would you mind if we sat down and talked for a couple of minutes?” He asked as he brushed past me and made himself comfortable in my lazy boy. Yeah, he wasn’t going anywhere, so I sat down on the couch across from him ready to bolt into my bedroom and grab my piece if things started getting hinky.

“I take it my wife was the one who hired you?” He asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that information, Mr. Marsh. Who my client is entirely confidential.”

He smiled and eased back in the chair and propped his legs up, now completely relaxed.

“Let’s not play games. You’re not an attorney or a licensed physiologist, so there isn’t any sort of legally binding confidentiality agreement when it comes to private investigators and their clients. So I’ll ask again: Was my wife the one who hired you?”

Yeah, he had my number.

“Yes, your wife hired me a week ago to track and document your movements.”

“And how much is she paying you for your services?”

“$8000.” Yeah, I lied, so what?

“That’s a considerable sum of money. But I was wondering, if I, let’s say, offered you double that amount my wife is paying you, would you be willing to destroy the evidence you collected about me and my extramarital activities?”

“I don’t think I could—-“

“Well, how about I just make it an even $20,000?”

“I—“

“Also, you know who I work for, right?”

“Yes.” I said timidly. If this guy had just stopped at $16,000, I would have said yes in a heart beat and I probably would have changed his diaper at no extra cost. But since he wasn’t letting me answer either way, so I was just letting him keep sweetening the pot.

“Well, Myriad Software is always in need of investigators such as yourself to conduct background checks and other such tasks. What would you say that along with the $20,000, I also offer you a 3 year exclusive contract with Myriad? Would you be willing to destroy all of the evidence you’ve gathered about me. Plus, you could still charge my wife for your efforts.”

o let you know, I’m a pretty ethical person, especially after the shenanigans my dad and grandpa pulled. But this thing, this thing had nothing to do with drugs or murder or anything of the kind. It was just about a guy who liked to crap his pants and have a hooker wipe and change them. Only a complete idiot would turn down this kind of offer.

“Okay, I’ll do it.” I said.

“Excellent! Now if you’ll be so kind to hand over every bit of incriminating material you have on me.”

I handed over everything, including my camera’s memory card and the report I’d just finished printing for Mrs. Marsh.

I still met with the dragon lady that afternoon and handed over my false and completely innocent report of her husband’s comings and goings over the past week, and collected the remaining $4000 she owed me. On Sunday, I took that dough to the dog track and blew the whole wad.

Early Monday morning, I received a FedEx form Mr. Marsh with a cashier’s check for $20,000 and a contract with Myriad Software. The contract was for 3 years at $75,000 per year.

Yeah, I was suddenly a functioning member of the American middle class, and it felt pretty damn great.

Chapter 9:

It was my old man’s great big retirement dream to spend his golden years out in Arizona. Like most mid-westerners, my old man had spent a week of his life in the Grand Canyon State when he was a teenager and fell in love with it because he hiked and camped in a big hole in the ground. For forty years the old man carried around that dream, he even carried a snapshot he took with my grandfather of the two of them at the bottom of the Grand Canyon smiling and sweating as a reminder of what he worked for day-in-and-out. Arizona was where he wanted to be, and he would do anything to get there.

Well, he did do anything and everything in the last ten years of his career to make sure him and mom could afford a condo out in Scottsdale. But when mom got breast cancer and then died two years later, something in my old man died, too. He stopped caring whether he made it out to Arizona. Hell, he stopped caring if he made it out of Chicago alive let alone retire, and because of his lack of caring, he got sloppy, too sloppy, and then he got bust by internal affairs for running numbers, and they ended up bringing him up on corruption and RICO charges. 25 years-to-life in Joliet, plus they stripped him of his pension and cleared out the hundred grand he had stashed in his retirement account because they figured it was his pay off dough. I know it wasn’t, I know that the money in his bank account was him and my mom going without new clothes or car for ten years at a stretch and squirreling away money. I also know that my old man would never be stupid enough to stash dope dealer money in the bank. I men, seriously, you’d have to be half retarded to make that kind of dirty money traceable. I figure he’s got it tucked away in some safe deposit box or buried somewhere. Because the fact is you don’t only make one-hundred grand when you’re rolling dirty. It’s actually probably closer to half-a-million. But I don’t ever press the old man about it when I go to visit him. Because who knows, the state of Illinois just might decide that he’s done his bid and let him out, and that money will actually let him live out his golden years in some kind of comfort.

But I’ll tell you what, if my old man felt the sun beating down on him like I did when I got off my plane at Sky Harbor International Airport, my guess is he would’ve scrambled back on the plane and would’ve demanded that the pilot take him back home.

May in Chicago is absolutely freaking gorgeous. Seriously, it’s the best and only time that the city is truly livable. In the winter it’s a freezer and in the summer it’s an absolute toilet, but in the spring, particularly in May, it’s breathtaking. Temperatures never rise above 70 and at night it only dips down into the 40’s. It’s basically sweater weather. It’s the time of year where young couples take long walks out by the gold coast and fall in love; it’s the time of year where everybody leaves their windows open to let in the fresh air. And yeah, it’s the time of year where you spend the weekend in shorts and head out to the parks to have a picnic and ogle all the college girls in their bikinis as they try to tan their sun deprived bodies.

But May in Phoenix, goddamn, it’s a freaking cesspool, and I’m being kind when I say it’s a cesspool, because it’s actually about as close to Hell as a living human being is going to get.

When I stepped off the plane it was 95 degrees, and that whole “it’s a dry heat” thing, that’s a crock of crap piled on top of crack. When we landed, the sky was equal parts burning, blistering sun and ominous gray clouds full of rain. The problem was it was so hot that even if it tried to rain, the drops would just evaporate in the heat. Even inside my terminal while waiting for my luggage and standing in the cool confines of the air conditioned nightmare that is Sky Harbor International Airport, I was dripping sweat like Dom DeLuise after playing two games of racquetball.

And it only got worse once I was outside trying to hail a cab so I could get out to the hotel Junior was putting me up in out in Scottsdale. Virtually every cab stand was vacant and I stood out on the concrete and asphalt turning into a stinky puddle. After thirty minutes, a cab finally showed up and took me to a swank hotel Junior booked me in called the Valley Ho in Scottsdale. It was retro in all the annoying ways you think of retro, except for the pool are which was pack to the gills with hard bodies dancing waist deep in the water. Not a bad way to cool and sport a hard-on while you gyrated to techno beats pressed against a wannabe stripper with a spray tan in a thong. I would definitely be checking it out later, but for the moment I needed to get out of the heat and get myself into the proper mindset to work.

Ever since I started “working” for Junior, I hadn’t been taking on much work as a PI. In fact, I hadn’t taken a single job since falling into the service of the Vecchio family and mostly kept a roof over my head from hand outs and skimming a bit here and there from my unaccompanied pick-ups. But when you’ve been at the PI game for as long as I’ve been, digging and discovering information is as easy to slip back into as slipping into a warm bath.

Junior hadn’t sent me out to the desert entirely empty handed as far as information was concerned. The first thing he’d been able to provide me with was the rental application of the lick and grab twins. Neither of them was on the lease other than the basic information that they would be the ones occupying the apartment, but their folks were the ones footing the bills. Despite being a complete dirtbag, Junior was also a fairly shrewd and thorough business man. The rental agreements he gave me were, to say the least, comprehensive. Of course, when you’re renting a 900 square foot, two bedroom apartment for $3000 a month, you wanted to make sure whoever was doing the renting could actually afford to live there. Combine that with the fact that the said same apartment building was also a combination drug lab/porn set/trick pad, you also wanted to make sure that who you were renting to had nothing to do with law enforcement.

The lick twins were named Nicolas Stills and Patrick Myers, both of them originated from a town called Carefree. A quick Google search on my laptop brought the city’s website up, and it was a mere thirty miles from where I was currently sitting. According to the website, Carefree had started out as an artist community, but over the years had transformed into an oasis of the insanely rich of Arizona, and was the home of a few former movie and rockstars I didn’t know anything about, and a couple of politicians I knew even less about, except for that Dan Quail guy, and who could forget that dumb ass excuse for a vice president.

I dug into the Stills and the Meyers a little bit, which was easy enough to do considering the amount of information the families had to provide for Junior’s rental agreement, including home and business addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and social security numbers. All the vitals someone would need to steal your identity and bleed you dry, and chances were that’s exactly what Junior planned on doing once his tenants vacated their high priced luxury apartments.

I think that’s what drives me the battiest about the idle rich. Hell, about the middle class in general, they’re so damn trusting. They fill out applications and input information into websites without the slightest clue of who’s actually operating things behind the scenes and what, exactly they’re doing with all that precious information. Don’t get me wrong, 99% of the businesses and websites currently running are entirely legit and aren’t going to do a damn thing with the information they’ve gathered other than store it in some dusty file cabinet or on a server so secure that not even the best and sleaziest hackers couldn’t penetrate it. And maybe Junior had absolutely zero plans of scamming his tenants (which I doubted, that guy’s always working an angle), and he was coming at these apartments as a completely legitimate business. Most gangsters own legitimate business so they can launder money through them without the IRS getting wise about where the money was actually coming from.

But whatever, I shrugged it off and searched for the Stills and Myers, and neither one of the families were hard to find because both of them had Wikipedia pages.

The Myers came from old East coast banking and garment district money and had moved out to Arizona during the coper and silver booms in the early 1940’s and made even more money than they had come out here with. The current generation of Myers were well known real estate investors and had one son, Patrick. Patrick was the kid who’d let me into the apartment. The pictures I saw of him online were of a clean cut and rather conservative young kid who looked like he was going to spend his life pursuing public office. I guess college had really changed the kid?

The Myers family was tight. There wasn’t a single negative article or rumor about them online which most likely meant they paid someone to keep their family name out of the media and off of the web. Which probably meant they were too tight to approach once I started sniffing around about the green dope I’d found in their apartment.

The Stills, on the other hand, were a completely different story. The Stills were incredibly new money. The mother and father, Michael and Dorothy, were the authors of a best selling series of children’s books about a cowboy armadillo named Maurice. Michael wrote the stories and Dorothy illustrated. Michael was also once a well known investigative journalist who hung it all up once the kiddie books hit it big. He was big time and had won a couple of Peabody awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer. The couple had two children, the aforementioned Nicolas who was attending the University of Chicago on a full chemistry scholarship (I was thinking maybe the kid might have something to do with the manufacturing of the green dope. But who knew?), and a daughter named Allison who was attending Arizona State University down the road in Tempe. The family was basically an open book who had a public website and more social media than you could shake a stick at. They would be the ones I approached once I got around to them.

My biggest concern, however, was contacting Junior’s cartel people. Those folks gave me more than a bit of heart burn. Okay, more than just a little bit, the Mexican cartels flat out frightened me.

Let’s jump into a little more Organized Crime 101, shall we? (And I promised I won’t be as thorough as I was about the Vecchio’s, but it’s important for you to understand why I’m so scared of these people.)

Back in the early 70’s during the waning years of Nixon’s second term as President, good old Tricky Dick wanted to appear tough on crime because so many of the GI’s he’d sent off to die were coming home hooked on Cambodian heroin. Now here’s the thing with Tricky Dick, the guy was a complete and paranoid nut job and the student of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Like most people of his generation, Hoover had a real hard-on about black folks. His hard on mostly had to do with the blacks asking for more rights, better pay, and the same chance at a bright future for their children. But Hoover translated this basic human desire as big old black guys wanting to screw white women and polite the white race with their black genes. (Yeah, I know, it sounds idiotic and barbaric, but it’s how a lot of these old timers thought, this is including my own grandfather, who was a Chicago police detective for nearly forty years.)

Nixon had inherited this paranoia of the black race infiltrating the white race from Hoover, and he tried his damnedest to make sure no race mixing would happen and that the blacks would stay in their neighborhoods and remain shiftless and uninspired. And the way he would do this was by flooding the streets of black neighborhoods and cities with heroin. More specifically, heroin shipped into the states from Cambodia by the CIA. Quick history question? Have any of you ever heard of Air America? Chances are you might remember the movie with Mel Gibson and Robert Downy Jr. Well, in the movie, Air America was portrayed as these whacky scamps who dumped pro-democracy fliers all over the Cambodian jungles.

But what Air America really was a CIA backed organization that smuggled millions of pounds of heroin into the states to distributed throughout various ethnic communities, but mostly to black neighborhoods. It was just Tricky Dick’s way of keeping down the darkies and honoring his mentor.

The big issue was that with Vietnam winding down, there was no way the CIA could keep transporting the stuff into the states so easily. And like I said before, with so many GI’s coming home hooked on junk, Nixon needed to start addressing the issue he’d pretty much single handedly created. But the thing is he couldn’t go after the CIA and Air America, nor could he afford to put more attention on Vietnam, because we were getting our asses kicked over there, and there wasn’t a single American who wanted us to stay over there to fight the dreaded Communists let alone a problem like heroin that most white, middle class Americans were barely aware of.

So instead of focusing on the real drug problem coming out of Vietnam and Cambodia, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency and decided to go after Mexico.

Now during the 70’s, there were drugs coming out of Mexico, but it was mostly pot and a little bit of black tar heroin. Mind you, not huge amounts, but just enough for Nixon and the newly formed DEA to scare people with. Anyway, Nixon went on TV, spouted off about how the biggest threat to the American people was illegal narcotics, blah, blah, blah, and the DEA teamed up with the Mexican Federales and burned a few poppy fields to ash. It was a great piece of PR, and it was the begin of America’s nearly fifty year old war on drugs.

Let’s go ahead and fast forward five or ten years to the 1980’s and the cocaine boom. Now as most of you probably already know, America had a bit of a cocaine problem during the 80’s. I mean coke was everywhere. It was in the suburbs, the cities, the ghettos, everywhere, and the guy supplying most of it was a dude named Pablo Escobar. Of course, as most of you probably already know, good old Pablo was Columbian and was the most vicious gangster in the history of gangsters. I mean, this guy wouldn’t just kill off entire families if you betrayed him, he would wipe out entire villages. The man was ruthless, and because of this ruthlessness he remained the cocaine Kingpin of the world for well over twenty years.